Tag: swap

What if there were no exchanges to hack? As a new generation of crypto users begin to invest in the technology, developers are growing concerned about its infrastructure. They've seen this happen before – new users enter the space attracted by big gains, then suddenly, a catastrophic failure, usually at the very exchanges designed to hold and custody those funds. But out of adversity, inspiration is taking hold, with high-profile coders turning their focus to atomic swaps, a concept that claims to allow for the direct, peer-to-peer transfer of cryptocurrencies across different blockchains. In the place of the vulnerable exchanges we use today, the idea behind…

A team of cryptocurrency startup developers is open-sourcing technology that enables trustless trading between the bitcoin and ethereum blockchains. Now available on GitHub, the code has already been used to execute what startup Altcoin Exchange claims is the first so-called "atomic swap" between the largest cryptocurrencies by market value. As a result of the release, a now larger community of developers can play around with and build on top of the code. For example, using Altcoin Exchange's tech, developers can lock ether tokens in an ethereum smart contract that specifies the funds will only be sent if an equal amount of bitcoin is sent to a bitcoin address during…